Equinox Page 10

  He grinned too, flattered. "That may not remain as your prerogative. By the book, you can't erase an officer's seniority because you want to play favorites."

  Ah, the nasty ring of truth. Janeway frowned. "I'm spoiled. I've been away from other Starfleet influences so long that I've gotten too used to having my way. We've been together now longer than most crews. We haven't had people transferring in and out as a ship usually does. We've all gotten ironed into our positions. You and I have gotten used to our privileges, and the lower officers have gotten used to having us as a buffer between them and the big decisions. Now, all that might be turned upside down."

  "I don't like Ransom very much," Chakotay admitted, "not that it matters. He's a little hard-bitten for me, but who can blame him? Considering that he never trained for a long-term crisis, or to be a captain at all, it's to his credit that they're alive at all, never mind actually making distance progress."

  "Oh, well, that's another thing!" Janeway leaned forward, elbows on her desk. "How have they made that much progress? One wormhole? Have you ever heard of a wormhole that covered that much distance?"

  "Nobody has that answer, Kathryn. Are you saying he's lying?"

  "No ... maybe ... no, but only that he seems to have his answers too quickly."

  Chakotay fell silent a moment, a brief mutuality of suspicion and doubt. "Captain," he ultimately suggested, "you could be misreading all of this. Don't get me wrong-so could I."

  "All right," she challenged. "How would you read it differently?"

  Janeway watched him as he sat there and thought about it for another moment, appreciating him.

  "When you're drowning," he began, "all you want is one more breath of air. It comes down to that. You don't care that you're freezing, that your clothing is in shreds, you haven't eaten in a month, or that you look silly with your hair wet. All you want is that breath. Then, all at once, you're rescued! You're lying on the raft, starved, freezing, but you don't care because you can breathe. Then, after you've been breathing awhile, you start to think maybe it'd be nice just to have a blanket. When you're starving, you don't care that you have no shelter and you stink."

  "All that is short-term," Janeway said. "You're either done drowning pretty soon, or you're dead. Ransom's experience lasted years. What does that do?"

  "Like slow starvation, then," Chakotay altered his analysis. "All you know is that you're in a ditch with a load of bread and what people think doesn't matter. The world is great because you have the bread. It doesn't matter that people are looking down at you because you're a bum. A while later, you've eaten and hunger isn't your motivator anymore, and you start

  thinking about how nice a real bed might feel. You start to notice the people staring at you because you're smelly. Well, maybe I want a little more than to sit here and eat bread. Your other priorities are coming back online. Motivations rebuild like a computer reloading. Eventually you start to realize what you were trying to do before you were starving and drowning. Maybe you still want to try that."

  "Starving, drowning ... when you empathize, you don't beat around the bush, do you?" Janeway blinked, overwhelmed by the clarity of his perceptions, hoping she was interpreting them right. "You're saying Ransom might be satisfied, even happy, to be a researcher again? He might not want the first officer's posting?"

  He began now to doubt his own logic. "I'd still want it, but that's me. I'm just saying that the Equinox crew is acting too cool to be normal. They gave themselves up for dead, made their peace, and suddenly they were resurrected."

  "And the near-death experience has driven more than one person to instability."

  "They'll come back, is what I'm saying," Chakotay tried to explain. "They haven't had enough time to settle down, remember what they really want, who they are, or even decide who to trust or what their mission should be. But they will. They'll slowly 'reload their programming.'"

  "Yes, it's what's so unique about humans," Janeway added. "We're never satisfied for long. If we were, we'd never advance. We'd just settle down with the bread and the bed and eat and sleep ourselves into atrophy."

  "What are you going to do? Tell him regulations give you authority to order him to abandon his ship, but you're going to ignore regulations when it comes to his seniority?"

  His reissuing of the critical question, this time, couldn't be brushed off or turned philosophical. It was real, tangible, and problematic. Soon it would gain a sharp reality, and things would have to change.

  Janeway entertained a brief, insane moment of handing command over to him and Ransom and retiring to some nice pink planet somewhere.

  "Starfleet regulations represent solidity for us," she told him. Her voice was a cold rasp, deep in her throat. "Regulations are civilization. They're my anchorage. If we're going to be saved, regulations will be what saves us."

  He nodded, flexed his legs and placed both feet on the carpet, and leaned forward. For a second or two he gazed at the carpet, then looked up, then stood up.

  "Understood," he said, unreadable. "Whatever you wish, Captain. I'll back you up."

  "I'm in."

  Voyager's Emergency Medical Hologram had known since the beginning that something very special was going on. Discovery of a totally new Starfleet ship, so far-flung from Federation space, had raised the heart rates and metabolism, not to mention the spirits, of everyone on board. Even Tuvok and Seven, two separate interpretations of Vulcanness, were reacting with heightened senses. Now the EMH had another group of

  physiologies to track, to log, to care for. There was something pleasant about that, even for a hologram.

  This area was still very dark. No one had been working here because of the contamination. The research lab of a strictly science-oriented vessel was a complex place. Ev ery wall was stocked with storage, incubators, computer analysis equipment, scrapings, chemicals, slides, and everything that could be pressed into service on a floating science platform.

  Unlike the utilitarian tidiness of Voyager's labs, this area was cluttered and mangled, its deck almost hidden under wreckage.

  Once his ocular program adjusted, he began to move through the wreckage, surveying the lab, his goal the multiphasic chamber only ten steps away. Instantly he saw the chamber and its unexpected contents. Inside the stasis compartment was a twisted, petrified mass, obviously organic, but crystallized. Its football-shaped skull was eyeless, its mouth gaping, frozen.

  No one had reported this. As the ship's only doctor, he would have been the one to be consulted.

  "I've found the multiphasic chamber," he reported as he opened his tricorder to analyze the corpse. "There's some land of organic mass inside. It appears to be a member of the alien species, but its cell structures have vitrified."

  Moving the tricorder, he shifted analysis from organic to mechanical.

  "This is more than just a stasis chamber," he reported. "It's some kind of matter-conversion technology. Stand by ... there's a control port here. Hmmm..."

  From Voyager, Tuvok was monitoring and recording the analysis. "Doctor?"

  Strange. The Vulcan sounded impatient. Vulcans shouldn't get impatient. That was against their programming.

  "The chamber," The Doctor continued, "contains a polaron grid and a submolecular sequencer. It looks like it was designed to convert the alien cell structures into some kind of crystalline compound."

  Then Seven's voice, "That function was not specified in their schematics."

  "1 have a feeling there's a lot here they didn't 'specify.' " Moving to a work station, he enabled the monitor and read the alphanumeric data scrolling anxiously on the screen. "I've accessed their research log. They're encrypted ... but judging by the file headings, they've performed this procedure dozens of times."

  Informed now, he crossed to a specimen stand that held a vial filled with a dark granular fluid.

  "More of the alien compound," he reported, "but it's been biochemically altered. They've extracted the base proteins. Its molecular struc
ture is most unusual..."

  "Can you be more specific?" Tuvok asked.

  "It appears to store a great deal of nucleogenic energy. I'm not an engineer, but I'd say they were trying to convert this material into a source of power."

  Once activated, a nearby wall monitor provided an unexpected correlation for a research lab, a schematic of the exotically modified warp core. Why would that have anything to do with ...

  "Doctor," Tuvok asked, "can you discern whether

  the specimens were alive or dead at the time of their..."

  "Their 'use'? I can't tell that yet. I understand the gravity of your question. Tuvok... you'd better notify the captain."

  "I'm going to miss this ship."

  Though Max Burke openly appreciated the talents of a passing female Voyager crew member striding past him and Rudy Ransom, Ransom wished his first officer would keep his eyes to himself and his mind on their problem. The ship was almost ready-their own ship.

  "Once we're back on Earth," Ransom told him sternly, "there'll be plenty of pretty girls. Status?"

  "Ready on all fronts," Burke reported, virtually whispering, "the transport enhancers are in place. And Noah's created the subroutine to mask Voyager's internal sensors."

  "Power couplings?"

  "Bypass controls have been routed to our bridge. All you need to do is say, 'Energize.' "

  Ransom paused as someone else walked by and disappeared. "Janeway wants to bring the security grid online at nineteen hundred hours. We'll have to act before then. Tell the others to-"

  As they rounded a T-sect, two security guards strode toward them with undisguised purpose, one with his hand on his phaser.

  "Max-" Ransom calmly nodded toward another corridor, then steered Burke down that way. A few

  more paces ... step lively. "The transporter room's not far from here. Keep moving."

  Janeway was smarter than he thought. Or he hadn't fooled her at all. He couldn't tell which. He hoped he'd fooled her some because, if so, there might still be a way out of this.

  Would the guards chase them? Would they open fire? Even phaser stun was questionable against a post captain. Did Janeway possess the nerve to have given that order already? To fire on another ship's officers without due process? She couldn't be that sure of her standing, regulations or not.

  Twenty more steps. The transporter room. He could lock the door once he was inside. Most of his crew was already on Equinox, still working. He bet Janeway wouldn't already have slammed them in the brig before consulting their captain about the circumstances. He and Burke were the last-if he could have those twenty steps-

  "Captain Janeway wishes to speak with you."

  The Vulcan appeared in front of them, heading them off, phaser drawn. Another security guard was with him.

  No mistake. They'd figured out some of it. Part of it

  Beside Ransom, Burke's hand slipped to his own phaser.

  No-

  Ransom put out his own hand, stopping the challenge before it turned sour. Behind him, the footfalls of the other two guards converged. He braced himself, willing Burke to take the cue.

  "All right, Mr. Tuvok," Ransom said strictly. "That's enough. We won't draw on you. You're holding weapons on Starfleet officers, do you realize that?"

  "Of course, Captain," the Vulcan said. "We determined that your passions might compromise us all. This is a precaution. Captain Janeway is waiting for you. Mr. Burke will accompany us to a holding area until the captain makes her decision."

  "Until she makes her decision," Ransom echoed bitterly. "She hasn't even been to the gate yet, Mr. Tuvok. Why don't you stand aside and let me lead the way. Because we both know you won't fire on me."

  Janeway sat at the head of the table in the briefing room. Her unhappy task lay before her, in the form of a mute witness to war crimes-a lab palette with a couple of handfuls of alien matter reduced to crystals. Her anger fused the room. It felt hot in here. Confirmation of bottom-feeding suspicions was a bitter thing.

  Two armed guards stood at the door. At the opposite end of the table, by himself, was Captain Ransom.

  Or was he a captain now? His ship about to be abandoned, a maneuver to which he had acquiesced... through the broiling rage, Janeway could see no clear answer. Fuming with the sourness of the moment, she lay unchecked tension upon the funereal room.

  'Ten isograms," she said harshly, accusing. Picking up the PADD with the operative data, she scanned it for the twentieth time. "If I understand your calculations,

  that's enough to increase your warp factor by... what? Point zero three percent for one month?"

  Ransom was silent. Apparently she had the numbers right.

  "Unfortunately," Janeway went on, "that boost wouldn't get you very far. So you'd need to replenish the supply. And that means killing another life form. And another. How many lives would it take to get you back to the Alpha Quadrant?"

  The question hung, boiling, in open air. Hot in here now.

  The other captain's eyes were cold and unapologetic. Janeway put the PADD down. No point hashing percentages.

  "I think you know the reason we're under attack," she said. "These aliens are trying to protect themselves from you."

  Ransom shifted in his chair, losing some of the defiance. "Sixty-three," he bluntly said. "That's how many more it'll take. And every time I sacrifice one of those lives, part of me is lost as well."

  "I might believe that," Janeway snapped, "if I hadn't examined your 'research.' These experiments were meticulous. And they were brutal. If you felt any remorse, you'd never have continued."

  "Starfleet Regulation Three, paragraph twelve," Ransom shot back with utter confidence. " 'In the event of imminent destruction, a captain is authorized to preserve the lives of his crew by any justifiable means.' "

  A can of worms. She determined not to get into a wrangle with him over the definition of "justifiable."

  That was the trick word, the one they both knew was meant to offer captains interpretive flexibility. She'd lose that argument.

  The only answer was not to budge, and not to argue.

  "I doubt that protocol covers mass murder," she accused.

  Ransom ground his teeth. "In my judgment it does."

  "Unacceptable."

  His small eyes flared coldly. "We had nothing! My ship was in pieces!"

  Taken aback by his intensity, Janeway said nothing. There was no good way to handle this.

  Without her prodding he got a grip on his meltdown. "Our dilithium was gone," he suffered. "We were running on thrusters. We hadn't eaten in sixteen days! We had just enough power left to enter orbit of an M-class planet. Lucky for us, the inhabitants were generous... The Ankari... they provided us with a few supplies. They even performed one of their 'sacred rituals' to invoke 'spirits of good fortune from another realm.' To bless our journey."

  Bitterness tainted his words, but Janeway could still see no true regret, no bending toward the idea that he had broken a moral code and a legal one.

  "But these weren't spirits," Ransom went on. "They were nucleogenic life forms. Our scans revealed that they were emitting high levels of antimatter. So we managed to obtain one of the devices and constructed a containment chamber that would prevent the life form from vanishing so quickly. But something went wrong. It thrashed around and started to vitrify. We tried to

  send it back, but we couldn't reverse the flow through the device's fissure." For the first time, his eyes grew shaded with sorrow. "We examined the remains and discovered that the enhancement properties were still present."

  Now he looked up at her, and the challenge returned, now glazed with harsh reality.

  "It was already dead! What would you have done!"

  A perfectly legitimate challenge. Janeway sat with her chin tucked, fuming, and would not answer. She dared not sympathize or she would be condoning his interpretation. There were things she would have to keep on her side. Right now, silence was the tool. She had a new role to play t
hat did not include simply being another captain.

  "We traveled over ten thousand light-years in less than two weeks." Ransom sounded more defeated now, defiance and surrender flashing back and forth. "We'd found our salvation! How could we ignore it!"

  "By adhering to the oath you took as Starfleet officers," she told him icily. 'To seek out life. Not destroy it."

  "It's easy to cling to 'principles' when you're standing on a vessel with its bulkheads intact, manned by a crew that's not starving!"

  "It's never easy," Janeway countered, suddenly thinking of Chakotay. Her voice was firm, rough, like a recording. "But if we turn our backs on those principles we stop being human. I'm putting an end to your experiments. And you are hereby relieved of your command. You and your crew will be confined to quarters."

  She nodded to her guards, who approached to escort Ransom out.

  "Please," Ransom begged, "show them leniency. They were only following my orders."

  "Their mistake."

  Another hot potato. How far should a crew go? She expected orders to be followed too.

  Bitter and trembling, obviously angry at either her or himself, Ransom let the guards usher him toward the door. As the corridor panel opened, he turned back to her.

  "It's a long way home, Captain," he warned.

  Lips pressed tight, jaw aching, Janeway watched the door sweep shut, separating her from the ghastly duty she now found dumped in her lap. What was it like when your feet were on fire?

  Had that last sentence been a threat? Or was he warning her that she was looking at a future fractal of herself, her own command?

  Stiff as an old woman, she pushed up from her chair. Every bone in her legs clicked as if carrying on the argument by themselves.

  The bridge turned cold as she entered. She sensed it, but as if she were walking into an hallucination. Chakotay, Tuvok, Seven, Paris, Kim, The Doctor, others ... she sensed the eyes of each one, and met none.

  "Doctor," she said, looking at the main screen until she could muster what it took to look at him, "return to their research lab and retrieve all the data you can locate on the aliens. I want to find a way to communicate with them."